The need to share information among justice agencies through automation is a global issue that has been around for more than 30 years. Since the mid 1960s, the use of automation by law enforcement, courts, prosecution, and corrections proliferated without a real program or technology strategy. Over the years, the global justice community at the national, federal, state, provincial, and local levels created thousands of islands of data or “data pools.” Unfortunately, none of these data pools can share data directly via electronic connections with other systems.
Historically, justice information sharing has occurred both vertically and horizontally. Within a city or a county, operational information has been manually shared among law enforcement, the jail, the prosecutor and the courts. Recently, some of this information has been shared electronically as a result of point to point interfaces developed between two systems. At the federal horizontal level, information may be shared between agencies such as the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the US Attorney's office, the Federal Courts and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), although such federal agencies have not shared information well to date.
Vertically, information has been manually shared between local and state agencies. Criminal history and fingerprint information is sent to state agencies and entered into state repositories, which can be queried electronically. However, because the information sent to the state is often in paper form, the information contained in state repositories may be incomplete and inaccurate.
There has always been a need to share accurate information between justice agencies in real time and this need has historically been met only on a very limited basis. However, new technology and public demand have caused this need to evolve to include ever-broader amounts of information. The public has become more aware of crimes that could have been prevented if better information sharing systems had been in place and is demanding information sharing between different justice agencies across jurisdictional lines. In response to September 11th, The Patriot Act legalized the sharing of some types of intelligence information by law enforcement; this information was previously kept in standalone systems and not available for information sharing.
The advent of fingerprint scanning devices, digital photography and scanners also have created a demand for the ability to share biometric information; this need will continue to evolve as more forms of biometric technology are accepted and the need to integrate biometrics for increased accuracy and better access control becomes more acute.
The information sharing problem is not unique to any geography. It is a global issue, and some theaters are more prepared to deal with it than others. The events of 9/11 have increased the urgency of implementing integrated justice solutions at the state, local, national, and international levels.
Recently, government agencies have begun to invest in strategies for correcting the global issue of information sharing. There are several goals to be achieved by such automation, including:
First, for criminal justice practitioners, the notion of being able to track an offender through the justice process using an automated system with a single transaction is very desirable. The number of systems touched to locate an individual in the justice process sometimes counts in the twenties. The procedure for locating an individual can be very time consuming even if a user knows how to navigate multiple systems and has a good memory for transaction codes.
Second, as noted above, the need to more effectively share data horizontally and vertically in the justice and public safety community is critical and the problem has become a recognized priority among government leadership at all levels in all geographies: U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair recently chaired a meeting of his key staff on the issue of data sharing in the justice community. In the wake of 9/11, such information sharing is clearly a priority of the United States government.
Third, justice and public safety agencies around the world have rigorous demands for ease of use, security, privacy, redundancy, scalability, and data sharing. These requirements are compounded by the need to share data while maintaining total control of the agencies' legacy systems. Only recently have technologies emerged that would allow secure information sharing to exist on the scale demanded by justice and public safety agencies.
To date, there have been several attempts to provide integrated justice solutions to address these needs.
iWay Software offers an Integrated Justice Suite that bridges hundreds of different information sources to message formats like XML using adapters that integrate with legacy systems and support network protocols such as FTP, HTTP, message oriented middleware systems, and SOAP-based (Simple Object Access Protocol) web services. Data collection documents of any format are converted to XML and transformed for use in the Microsoft.NET™ and Java™ J2EE™ architectures. iWay Software purports that its technology platform is open and platform independent in that it runs on a variety of hardware platforms and operating systems and works with a variety of application server or integration platforms including the IBM WebSphere Application Server, the Microsoft BizTalk™ Server 2003, and other integration platforms.
iway suggests that it may use Unified Modeling Language (UML) documentation to collect business requirements of its customers to help it understand the operation of its customers' systems; however, iway does not provide a platform independent model upon which it can build an Integrated Justice Information Sharing (IJIS) solution for either .NET™ or J2EE™. Instead, iWay provides a packaged software solution that includes components written in Java™ and J2EE™ that can interface with either .NET™ or J2EE™. Also, iway does not share UML system solutions diagrams with its customers or integrate UML into the modeling of the system hardware and software architectures iway further does not provide UML documentation that permits a system prepared for one platform, e.g., J2EE™, to be readily rewritten for another platform, e.g., .NET™. Moreover, the Integrated Justice Suite utilizes a peer-to-peer architecture for its “Intelligent Adapters” and does not use an integration broker that provides a scalable hub and spoke architecture. As a result, system integration and implementation of the iWay system are difficult.
Thinkstream, Inc. has developed a distributed information networking platform that also utilizes peer-to-peer technology to facilitate scaling for a large justice system application. Thinkstream uses integrators that translate data from the back-end source to an XML format that is understood by all parties on the network, and business logic pertinent to each individual data source can be embedded in the integrators. Each integrator also supports the functions of data query, push, pull, publish and subscribe. However, as with the iWay system, the peer-to-peer architecture makes system integration and implementation difficult. Also, since the Thinkstream system is proprietary and does not use UML documentation, portability of the Thinkstream system is limited.
Mobiam Solutions Inc. offers a Watchdog 360 system that is an enterprise platform optimized for criminal justice system integrations. The architecture is based on a hybrid of a peer-to-peer approach and a hub-and-spoke design for application integration. The hub-and-spoke element of the design provides a centralized master hub to manage a web portal for entry into the system, to create search requests across the attached systems and to provide a centralized point of entry for a subscription engine. On the other hand, the peer-to-peer element processes workflow from sub-hub to sub-hub where the responses are managed on a point to point basis and each sub-hub handles is own processing. The sub-hubs may be configured at the agency level to store the information related to the systems associated with that agency as well as business rules particular to the attached source systems. Adapters are deployed within the sub-hubs to act as the interfaces to the source applications. As with the iWay and Thinkstream systems, the architecture is based on XML standards and Sun's J2EE™ and Microsoft's .NET™ standards. However, the Watchdog 360 system is a proprietary system that is not documented using the UML standard, thereby making changes to the system difficult and limiting portability of the design for application to new systems. Also, the Watchdog 360 system does not include graphical user interface (GUI) tools for building and configuring workflows, designing message formats, or message transformation. The workflows must instead be coded in XML.
Cross Current has deployed a Justice Hub™ integration framework on a B2B technology framework, such as a Microsoft .NET™ platform, with query, notification, imaging and data transfer functionality enabled by adapters to criminal justice agency systems. The Justice Hub™ system includes a web portal, application adapters and a B2B hub that uses Microsoft BizTalk™ software to deliver information integration over the Internet using a hub and spoke architecture and XML technology. Interoperability with the criminal justice agency systems is provided by using public security standards and specifications. Application integration is provided by the BizTalk™ server's support of the BizTalk™ open industry standard for document exchange and routing. Each agency system involved uses an application-specific adapter to connect the system to the Justice Hub™, and the adapters package the extracted data into XML messages for the Justice Hub™ BizTalk™ server. While the standardized adapters may be reused for other agencies having similar data requirements and the same vendor systems, the system, though of open architecture, is not platform independent. The Justice Hub™ system also does not appear to provide business use cases to guide messaging operation. Moreover, as with the Watchdog 360 system, the Justice Hub™ system is not documented using the UML standard, thereby making changes to the system difficult and limiting portability of the design for application to new systems.
Thus, the Integrated Justice Information Sharing (IJIS) solutions offered to date either provide a peer-to-peer platform or fail to provide a truly portable solution (i.e., non-proprietary) with the appropriate documentation using the UML standard, for example.
There is thus a great need in the art for a documentable, model-based, portable, platform independent IJIS solution that allows multiple justice agencies to share information in a secure environment that enables individual agencies to maintain and retain control over legacy systems and data. In particular, an IJIS solution is desired that integrates multiple diverse justice systems using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technology to share mission-critical data, documents, images, and transactions at key decision points in the justice system and to push, pull, publish and subscribe information needed to support day to day justice operations. The present invention addresses these needs in the art.